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Creating dramatic lens blur, defocusing, and depth of field effects is really easy.
Especially if you're wanting to create something like realistic bokeh.
But, of course, it's very easy if you have a camera and a lens that actually does that.
Well, the new Camera Lens effect and After Effects CS5.5 we allow you to create
very realistic lens blur even with footage that was shot
in perfect focus, so let's take a look at how we do that.
But first I'm going to show you what this finished version looks like.
So we take a look here--what we have is our character, and you can see that
the focus shifts from the foreground to the background and back again,
or background to foreground and back again where we start in focus on his face,
the focus shifts to his hand, back to his face, and then we have this light ball that's
illuminating and, again, starts in focus
as the focus approaches his hand and then defocuses as we move back.
This process is known as a rack focus,
and I'm going to show you first how we can create the rack focus.
The idea here is that we're going to modify the distance settings
to create a realistic rack focus, and then afterwards we're going to create
that photo-realistic bokeh and evidence all those edge halos as it renders
those out of focus points of light, reproducing the exact
characteristics of the real cameras and lighting conditions.
So in order to do this, I'm going to first start by turning off the effects.
Let's go ahead and turn off our Camera Lens Blur on both of these layers,
and allow me just to scrub through this so that you can see, in fact,
that this entire shot is in focus.
It's not out of focus so everything that you saw a moment ago was created in After Effects.
So let's do the rack focus.
Now to do that, we have to add a blur map.
We add the blur map so we can not only defocus the entire layer,
but we can actually reduce the depth of field effects directly in that single image.
So what you can see here is that I actually have a blur map,
and you can take a quick look at that, and you can see if we just
zoom back out here--the blur map being drawn on the hand--and if I go
up to my BG layer and I turn on Camera Lens Blur, you can see that the blur map layer
is set to layer number 4 BG blur map, and we're using the Luminence Channel here.
And simply by adjusting the Blur Focal Distance which currently is set to zero,
you can see that the hand is in perfect focus.
If I raise this now to one, it shifts the focus to his face--back to zero, focus shifts to his hand.
We've just created a rack focus--very easily.
So now what we want to do, now that we've created that rack focus,
let's focus on adjusting the actual look of the light ball in his hand.
And for this we obviously want the light ball to be in focus as the camera
approaches the hand, and then when it defocuses and moves back
to his face, we want to create those circles of confusion, right?
That beautiful photo-realistic bokeh, which actually mimics
the shape of the camera aperture, and all of this
can be done with the Iris Property Settings inside Camera Lens Blur.
So let's go up to the light ball layer here, and you can see that we've got this set.
Let's go ahead and turn that on, and right away it'll start adding that effect.
And if we scrub through it, you can see that now, as the focus shifts back to his face,
we begin defocusing on that light ball, and we get these really beautiful shapes here.
Now you can see it's using a hexagon.
Now if I actually wanted to mimic something like an 85mm
Prime f/1.8 wide open, it might actually be a bit more circular.
So I can set this to something like octagon, I can adjust the roundness,
but the key here is by using one single part of this effect, the Blur Radius,
I can very quickly adjust how that's going to look.
So simply by adjusting that one parameter, the Blur Radius, we can create those beautiful
circles of confusion, that photo-realistic boteh, and really change the look of this.
And, again, remember, this was all entirely in focus--brilliant stuff.
The best part about this too, is that the AE composition cameras can even use these
same settings to get more realistic depth of field blur.
Brilliant stuff--it's the Camera Lens Blur feature and After Effects CS5.5.
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